Inman

Postlets syndicates real estate data to search sites

Editor’s note: Tech Profile is a new Inman News feature that provides details about real estate technology companies.

Company name: Postlets.

Company headquarters: San Francisco Bay Area.

Contact information: feedback@postlets.com.

Number of offices: 4 virtual offices spread across San Francisco Bay Area and Boston.

Web site: www.postlets.com.

Company description/overview: Postlets is an online marketing platform that enables real estate professionals to promote their listings. Users upload their listing data and images through forms to create an online property listing. Postlets then syndicates the listing data to several real estate search sites and provides the html source code, widgets and other tools to enable further distribution. Postlets has about 150,000 registered users and continues to add about 400 new users per day.

Launch date: April 2005.

Current number of employees: 4.

Total funding to date: 0.

Sources of funding: Bootstrapped.

Management team: Asher Matsuda and Raymond Chen are co-founders.

Little known fact about the origins of the company: The first category that the company supported was cars and trucks.

Average Web visits per month: 1 million.

Who are your customers? Real estate buyers and renters, and real estate professionals.

Revenue model: "Freemium" — advertising plus premium products.

Profitable yet? Yes, from the beginning.

Geographic areas served: Mainly United States, but some international exposure via syndication.

Expansion plans, expansion timeline: The company is planning to develop new features and products to improve the service, and has plans to expand globally.

What is unique about your business model? The company reports that most of its resources are placed into things that impact the customer experience, such as product development, site operations and customer support. The company does not employ a sales force and doesn’t spend money on marketing. The company doesn’t own any physical assets or rent office space.

What’s unique about your office? "It doubles as my dining room — this doesn’t make my wife too happy," says co-founder Asher Matsuda.

Unique office traditions/rituals: Matsuda: "We code in our pajamas."

Employees’ favorite nearby restaurant: Matsuda: "The fridge. And Peet’s — is coffee considered food?"

News articles:
Craigslist HTML limits could doom flashy listings
VFlyer offers more options for service levels, pricing
Online tools to market, manage rentals multiply
Where and how brokers partner online
Classified listings tool pumps real estate ads to many sites

Click here to view more Tech Profile articles.

Information provided by Asher Matsuda, Postlets co-founder, and compiled by Pooja Kumar, Inman News.

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